Good idea bippy Even if that means a major change, it looks much clearer this way and it shortens the filenames without loosing info. I hope it's not refused because it would be too much work to adopt it...

to the human eye:
it looks uglier (at least to me), have to look with more attention if i'm looking for something that appears in the middle of that string, etc.
Imagining [cr7 - f NTSC - m - t +3 - tr en-partial Mr.X - Mr.Y] for a worst example would make me confuse trying to figure out.

Second, it would probably make it harder to identify correctly the things, in other words flags could be confusing since 2 flags could mean different things, having even more forms for the same flags means that they will be harder to found/understand and can be confused with more info etc.
And for extracting info from dats / parsing with tools it will became even harder / more prone to mistakes (this is the more important part in my opinion).

Concluding, yes it would make some sets smaller (you gained 15chars in your example) but i think that we should keep it "as simple as possible, but not simpler"

TNC is already questionable in some parts (as i already told idoru ) so there is no point in making it a bit worst.

Looking for "[tr" word in dats now gives you the translated ones (and some more info flags too i guess), with that you would have to look for "[tr" and "- tr" (and get some more info flags, also group names (ex: "(...)[cr blah - troo]") and other occurrences of " - tr" (in title for example).

But that's just my opinion

EDIT:

Quote:

Originally Posted by bippym

even if it was crft +12 flashtro it'd be better!
I think it is pointless duplicating certain info!

that creates problems and would reduce the cases where it could be used, like [cr2], [f PAL], [m bootblock], [t +12], [tr pt]...
how would it compress? [cr2fmttr PAL bootblock +12 pt flashtro]? how would one know if that is a more info or not?

Quote:

Originally Posted by TheCyberDruid

Hmm, as the seperation character I would suggest '|' (ASCII code 124). So it would be '[cr|f 680x0|t +12 Flashtro]'.

The problem with your suggestion is that "|" is not a valid char, you can test it trying to rename any of your files with it

Sorry but I don't like the idea, for me it looks too confusing.
It will shorten the name but then again you can't search for specific files in folders, not possible to search for [cr PDX] for example since it might be [cr - t PDX] then.

Also what would happen if we had something like [cr PDX][f TRSi][t +10 PDX]
would it become [cr - t +10 PDX][f TRSi] ?
That would break the rule of flag order which is:
[cr][f][h][m][p][t][tr][o][u][v][b][a][!]

The other idea about writing "crft +x Flashtro" isn't really nice too, it's too much info in such small space which can be easily overlook, I prefer having it the way it is now, even if it makes some filenames big but it's easier to find the info like that.

The whole point of making TOSEC consistent is that for all those people out there using the file for other programs would have an enormous headache if anything was to change. As I am working on the TOSEC Dat file with Excel this would end up being disastrous as I require the file to stay exactly the same for import.

If the file were to change, the extraction formula's would cease to work properly from the imported TOSEC Dat file, thus rendering the hard work I have done to useless.

I for one, request the format of the TOSEC Dat File to stay the same. If these were to change, and were to change on a regular basis, no one would ever be able to settle down to a consistent file format and would, probably, give up entirely using the TOSEC file, thus no one to help to update, rename or correct any parts of the file.

As the old saying goes, 'why fix something that isn't broken' it works, so lets leave it alone